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Two authors discuss how notions of race, culture, and gender differ when we toggle between American Exceptionalism and the French Exception.

a Q&A with LAURE MURAT and BRUNO PERREAU

While both France and the U.S. boast a racially and culturally diverse population whose sexual orientations and identities run a broad gamut, each country conceives of this diversity and of notions of citizenship in unique ways. Laure Murat and Bruno Perreau, two scholars who have made the transatlantic journey form French academia to the ivory towers of the U.S., offer their insights on these in the dialogue below.

Q:

How has migrating from France to the US transformed your scholarly work on France?

A:

LAURE MURAT: It’s transformed it in many ways. First, I should specify that I migrated from Paris to Los Angeles, and not from some provincial town in France to New York City or to the Midwest, for instance, which would have been different in each case. The greater distance (in miles, time difference and culture) from California makes a real difference, as well as the fact that Los Angeles is a very big and fascinating city but also the opposite extreme of Paris. It allows me reassess my vision of France and consider more accurately its limitations, its alienation from the past, but also its great qualities.

Second, I had the luck to be hired at UCLA, a great institution where intellectual life is extremely vibrant. Every week, lectures, conferences, and screenings give us the opportunity to discover new ways of thinking and work from people all over the world. My experience is of a “decolonization” of the mind and of a new openness. In particular, everything related to diversity, gender and queer theory, black feminism, racism, and the like is at the core of a complex reflection that France largely ignores. I also deeply appreciate the liberty we experience in the US when it comes to moving boundaries between disciplines.

At the outset of 2016 the Chinese government announced the end of its decades-long One-Child Policy. Introduced in the early 1980s alongside sweeping economic reforms, it was (and remains) the strictest fertility regulation in history, the goal of which—in the eyes of state authorities—was to cultivate a smaller, more competitive population that could help transform the nation into a global leader. After preventing roughly 400 million births and climbing to the top of the world economy, China has largely achieved these objectives. Yet, tragically, the combination of childbearing restrictions and parental preferences for healthy male heirs also led to the abortion and abandonment of countless female babies and special needs children, many of whom ended up in state-run orphanages. In a process managed by the Chinese government, over 140,000 of these children—primarily healthy girls—have joined Western middle-class families spread across 16 different countries through adoption.

International adoption has mushroomed into a multimillion-dollar industry.

International adop­tion can be controversial because it inherently mixes care with consumerism—at $20,000 to $30,000 US dollars per placement, it has mush­roomed into a multimillion-dollar industry upon which many Chinese orphanages and other service providers have become reliant. Typically, nations that allow outsiders to care for their most vulnerable children tend to be seen as lower down on the global hierarchy. When China first began its international adoption program in 1991, its economy was only beginning to transform, fitting the usual model in which babies tend to be sent from developing to industrialized regions. However, unlike other child “sending” countries, China has continued to place children abroad and accept foreign resources for its orphanages while enjoying unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. Why is the Chinese state allowing Westerners to assist and rear its most marginalized youth when it now has the ability to do so itself?

Max Weber, the author of such foundational sociological texts as Economy and Society and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, never held a professorship in sociology. Trained in law, and predominantly employed in academia as an economist, the closest Weber ever came to a post in sociology was an appointment to chair in social science, economic history, and economics at the University of Munich a year before his death. He himself, however, considered this to be an appointment as a “sociologist.” Today, many consider to be among the founders of the discipline writ large.

Yet because Weber was conversant in so many different disciplines, navigating his work can sometimes prove difficult. He made pioneering contributions not only to sociology, but to the study of politics and government, economics, religion, and the philosophy of science as well. A polymath who wrote widely and at great length, much of Weber's work concerns and continues to shape how we understand modernity and its attendant phenomena: the rise of capitalism, the secularization and bureaucratization of society, and the emergence of the rational-legal state. The Max Weber Dictionary, the second edition of which publishes next month, aims to distill key terms and core concepts from Weber's vast and complex corpus into a concise guide. And to synthesize a handful of those ideas even further we've paired a few of the entries from the latest edition into a still more concise lexicon—one well-tooled for the zeitgeist of the digital age: emoji-speak.

South Korea, one of the standout economic success stories of recent decades, now boasts the 11th biggest economy in the world and has quickly become a destination for migrants from neighboring countries in East and Southeast Asia. Though today, migrants from China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere flock to the country in search of opportunity, up to and during World War II, Koreans sought opportunity outside of their now popular homeland, migrating en masse to Japan and Manchuria. Both those ethnic Koreans who remained in Japan and Manchuria after the collapse of the Japanese Empire and the ethnically non-Korean migrants settling in South Korea today have complicated questions of citizenship, belonging, and identity—namely, who is Korean and what it means in practice—throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

Jaeeun Kim and Hae Yeon Choo, both of whom have studied migration to and from Korea and the attendant issues of membership politics and nationalism, answer a few questions about the politics of migration, citizenship, and national belonging in the Korean context.

Just as sociology notoriously failed to predict the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s, it was unprepared for the eruption of racial conflict that spawned the Black Lives Matter movement. As before, dominant discourses complacently assumed that the nation had made great strides in “race relations,” highlighted by the election of “the first black president” in 2008.

Just as sociology notoriously failed to predict the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s, it was unprepared for the eruption of racial conflict that spawned the Black Lives Matter movement.

By uncanny coincidence, the 1963 meeting of the American Sociological Association occurred on the same day as the historic March on Washington. In his presidential address Everett Hughes posed the right question: “Why did social scientists—and sociologists in particular—not foresee the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American society?” However, Hughes was utterly incapable of providing an answer to his own question and drifted off into pedantic obfuscation.

Actually, there were some sociologists who did anticipate the racial upheaval that “exploded” in the 1960s. Chief among them was W.E.B. Du Bois who wrote in 1906, at a meeting of the Niagara Movement in Harpers Ferry that spawned the NAACP: “We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.” Du Bois was not alone. There was a cadre of minority and radical scholars who anticipated the civil rights revolution, precisely because it fit into their theoretical and political paradigm. But like Du Bois, they were regarded as substituting politics for science, and were ignored or marginalized.

Though women in the United States enjoy much more freedom today in expressing their pregnancies than they used to, their behavior is still constrained by social expectations and stereotypes. The cultural mores surrounding pregnancy—for example that pregnant women ought to be health-conscious, self-sacrificing, retiring, and exceedingly careful—are perhaps nowhere more visible than when viewed through pop culture’s coverage of pregnant celebrities, who find themselves surveilled by the mainstream press and tabloids, their motherhood narrative crafted by media onlookers and held up under the microscope of the public eye.

The internationally renowned novelist has refused to write a narrative of pregnancy in the public eye, at all.

Celebrities like rapper M.I.A. and actress Mila Kunis, though, have recently offered performances of pregnancy that disrupt these expectations, and refuse to comply with popular wisdom. As I argued in my study of celebrity pregnancy M.I.A.’s “pregga swagga” on display at the 2009 Grammy awards, asserted the power of women: With it, she refused to perfo rm the wilting, fragile, incommodious feminine associated with late stage pregnancy, charging onto stage to deliver an energetic performance while nine months pregnant. Mila Kunis’ performances of pregnancy—from a fire-and-brimstone skit on the Jimmy Kimmel show, to an unassuming interview she gave to Ellen—all combined to deny the press an easy verdict on maternal style—narratives that often slate into two types: the docile good girl or the bad mom.

Now Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has taken this disruptive denial of narrative to glorious new heights: the internationally renowned novelist has refused to write a narrative of pregnancy in the public eye, at all. As she told an editor from the Financial Times over lunch at the end of June, “I have some friends who probably don’t know I was pregnant or that I had a baby.”

Tokyo has always had a magical effect on me. I grew up in Hamamatsu, a mid-sized industrial city known for producing Yamaha motorcycles and pianos. In contrast to my ordinary life there as an office assistant in the mid-nineties, I found Tokyo to be extraordinary—with its splendid commercial districts, dense population, and urban sprawl.

After studying in the United States for seven years, I returned to Japan in 2004 as an anthropologist to conduct research on Tokyo’s red-light district and the host clubs where men cater to female consumers for exorbitant sums of money. While living there, I saw firsthand how rapidly Tokyo had changed since my youth in the nineties. For instance, Roppongi Hills, a 54-story mega-complex of apartments, offices, bars and restaurants, designer boutiques, galleries, and a movie theater had just opened. Real estate developers, politicians, and journalists heralded the project as a vivid symbol of Japan’s future. Tourists took advantage of the building’s rooftop observation deck not only for its panoramic views of the city but also the excitement and even optimism that these scenes of urban life often provoke. While visitors enjoyed the view, global investors were privy to a different vision: such urban developments are also sites of intense speculation.

Since the beginning of my career I have worked extensively on issues concerning race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, in the context of modern thought and literature. As such, I have been challenged (by students, colleagues, institutional mandates, and other pressures) to demonstrate how literary criticism might contribute to an understanding of these world-making social fictions. This question has been made all the more poignant, on the one hand, by the strides in the natural and social science literature on these issues, and on the other, by the perceived crisis in humanities writ large and the role of literary studies in particular in contemporary education.

What is the power of a work of literature to affect a reader’s perception of his or her world?

When I began graduate school, there was a shared belief among a sizeable portion of the profession regarding the political efficacy of cultural critique. Throughout the late 1980s and into the ’90s, this excitement was manifested in the rock star status within literary criticism of a few academics, of whom Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Edward Said, and Fredric Jameson were the most prominent. But by the late 1990s the shine of these academic luminaries had faded, and the time of theory and its attendant methods seemed to be in retreat. In response we’ve seen a variety of new approaches that constitute nothing less than a field-wide search for method—from broadening the purview of the discipline (to include video games, graphic novels, and electronic media) to pioneering new methodologies (including the emergent field of quantitative literary analysis).

Yet not all literary critics have responded to the sense of crisis by looking beyond the traditional objects or boundaries of our discipline. Some have retrenched, turning their gaze inward, in order to advocate a kind of a “doing what we do, but doing it better.” The questions they raise are theoretical and methodological: What is the power of a work of literature to affect a reader’s perception of his or her world? How might a nuanced and insightful interpretation of a given text affect our perception of that text—and by extension, of the worlds it represents?

The Gang Crimes Unit of the State’s Attorney’s Office in Cook County, Chicago was where the most bullish state’s attorneys worked. Many were nicknamed for their ferocity, sounding like their own gang of sorts­—“Dirty Dog” Richardson, “Beast-Man” Miller, William “Billy Club” McManus, to name a few. These were the types of men who comfortably put both feet up on their desk and welcomed you to their office with the soles of their shoes.

Nameless mug shots of a stream of black and Latino defendants acted as wallpaper for their office.

Nameless mug shots of a stream of black and Latino defendants acted as wallpaper for their office—a visual souvenir of convictions and conquests. This wallpaper provided a striking, racialized backdrop to the practice of criminal law and was my first introduction to the criminal courts and criminal justice. Nearly all the prosecutors who built and exhibited this showpiece were white; in contrast, nearly every mug shot in the mural was a person of color. I moved backward several steps so that I could see the entire wall, and then I paced reverently along it, as though I were scanning a memorial of the dead.

Supporters of women’s reproductive rights and autonomy have cried foul at Carly Fiorina’s cynical use of ultrasound as a backdrop to her fact-challenged takedown of Planned Parenthood. In a recent video filmed in a private clinic in South Carolina, Fiorina stands at the side of Lacey Thomas, seventeen weeks pregnant with her second child. With more than a dozen reporters in the room, Ms Fiorina gripped Ms. Thomas’ elbow, laughed with her about baby names and the joys of pregnancy, and marveled at the visible spinal cord—then left to address reporters, using the moment as an opportunity to denounce public funding for Planned Parenthood clinics.

The pundits say that Donald Trump’s perch atop the Republican primary polls is due to Trump himself: that he’s different from the others, that he talks off-script and tells the truth. But Mr. Trump owes his recent political success to something systemic in American politics, namely, the absence of a coherent political agenda that adequately addresses mounting social inequality in the US. The resulting detachment and alienation experienced by so many people has made an “outsider” spouting extreme and often nonsensical views seem attractive.

Mr. Trump owes his recent political success to something systemic in American politics.

Much has been said of the Trump phenomenon, but we want to question the emphasis on his personal qualities and the notion that he is a charismatic figure. Political observers attributed the August 6th primary debate’s blockbuster ratings to the “Trump show”; we take a different view. To us, his ascendancy suggests that there are considerable swaths of the electorate who are disarticulated from the party system; that is, folks who used to heed the call of their party no longer do. These voters, mainly on the right, are willing to listen to someone who at least sounds different even if that difference lacks substance.

Across the globe families depend on the labor of migrant women to clean their homes and care for their loved ones. They include Salvadoran and Mexican women who clean homes in the United States; Polish and Ukrainian women caring for the elderly in Italy; Indonesian, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Nepalese women caring for families in East and West Asia; Ethiopian and Kenyan women cleaning homes in West Asia; and Filipino women cleaning and caring for families in more than 160 countries.

The majority of these migrant workers are from Southeast Asia (an estimated count of 1.8 million Indonesian and 1.4 million Filipino domestic workers are employed outside of their country). Their work varies across nations; those in Israel and Taiwan mostly do elder care work, those in Canada and Denmark primarily provide child care, and workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and countries in West Asia including Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and among others Qatar do what they describe as the “all around work” of cooking, caring and cleaning households. In return, host countries offer these workers partial citizenship and few legal protections.

For several years now, a quiet revolution has been underway in consumer electronics. Gadgets that are a part of our everyday lives have learned to see. Relying on optical devices and software that can detect faces and track body motions, cameras, gaming systems, phones, and other tools have gained access to the mechanisms of visions and recognition that were once considered the unique province of sentient beings.

But some of these technologies have a problem: they have a hard time seeing people of color.

Race is made visible by social practices—a claim that is confirmed, ironically, by the experiences of the blind.

In December 2009 Wanda Zamen and Desi Cryer, two employees at a camping supply store in Waller, Texas, noticed something peculiar about an HP computer at the shop. The computer featured a digital camera that detected and tracked human faces. The system had no problem identifying and following Wanda, who is white, but it could not do the same for Desi, who is black. He demonstrates the glitch in a YouTube video that has been viewed almost 3 million times. “As you can see, the camera is panning to show Wanda’s face. It’s following her around. But as soon as my blackness enters the frame, . . . [the camera] stops,” he says.

We need a new way of thinking about the interplay of individualism and community.

by PHILIP GORSKI

The American Dilemma is an old dilemma. It predates Obama; Addams, too. In fact, it is as old as the American Project, itself. The Puritans felt it. So did the Founders. Today, some of us feel it more acutely than they did; others hardly feel it at all. Why?

The American Dilemma is an old dilemma. In fact, it is as old as the American Project, itself.

As Jim Sleeper explains (in a forthcoming issue of Democracy Journal), the Puritans felt it because their covenanted communities welded together public and private purpose and maintained a balance between individual freedom and social obligation.

To the Puritans’ language of covenanted community, the Founders added the language of civic republicanism. It provided another means of joining individual and collective wellbeing. Consider the republican idea of freedom. In the classical liberal vision, freedom is the absence of constraint and protection from interference. In plain language: doing what you want and asserting your rights, so long as you cause no physical injury to others.

Republican freedom is more demanding. It involves “civic virtue”: active participation in self-government and self-sacrifice for the common good. For the Founders, then, freedom was not autonomy; it was not “riding off into the sunset” or “hitting the open road.” It was skillful action that aims at the common good.

The Obama Foundation recently announced that the Obama Presidential Library will be built in Chicago, where the President developed his skills as a community organizer in the 1990s. By choosing the city where he forged his identity as an activist and politician, the President is literally situating his legacy in the community that made him who he is today.

Erik Schneiderhan calls this “the politics of helping others.” And he notes the competing interests pulling at all of us who are looking to better our communities:

How do Americans act in the face of competing social pressures when trying to help others in their communities? … The conflicting social demands of individualism and community assistance comprise a challenge that many face—it’s the American’s Dilemma. Well-meaning people are torn, akin to Goethe’s Faust who bemoaned having two souls beating in one breast. Whether the president of the United States, a registered nurse, or a university student, at some point most Americans wonder how to help others while still working toward the American Dream, how to lend a helping hand and still be a bootstrapping success.

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